How to Fake a Haunting

Callum Taylor drinks, hallucinates, and behaves in ways his wife has run out of explanations for. Lainey has been calculating for a while how long it will be before he does real harm to her or to their daughter Beatrix, and what she can do about it that a court would actually act on.

Her friend Adelaide has a different idea. If Callum already cannot trust what he sees, they can give him something to see. Nothing spectacular: a smell that has no source, noises inside the walls, flies let loose along the windowsills. Enough to make a man who is already unsteady leave the house on his own.

Christa Carmen puts this plan into a house that was full of rage and fear before anybody staged anything, and lets it come apart. As the haunting stops answering to the two women running it, Lainey ends up needing the one person the whole scheme was designed to get rid of.